Synopses & Reviews
Review
"...well and clearly written....can be used as a textbook as well as a monograph." Peter Bachmann, Mathematical Reviews
Review
"...an indispensable compendium for the researcher or graduate student working on constraint-based grammatical formalisms, and they also make it a very useful reference work for researchers in object-oriented databases and logic programming." Fernando Pereira, Computational Linguistics
Synopsis
This book develops the theory of typed feature structures and provides a logical foundation for logic programming and constraint-based reasoning systems.
Synopsis
This book develops the theory of typed feature structures, a data structure that generalizes both first-order terms and feature structures of unification-based grammars to include inheritance, typing, inequality, cycles and intensionality. The resulting synthesis serves as a logical foundation for grammars, logic programming and constraint-based reasoning systems.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements; Part I. Basics: 1. Introduction; 2. Types and inheritance; 3. Feature structures; 4. Attribute-value descriptions and satisfaction; Part II. Extensions: 5. Acyclic feature structures; 6. Appropriateness and typing; 7. Inequations; 8. Identity and extensionality; 9. Maximality, groundedness and closed world inference; Part III. Alternatives: 10. Variables and assignments; 11. Feature algebras; 12. Infinite feature structures and domains; Part IV. Applications: 13. Unification-based phrase structure grammars; 14. Definite clause programming; 15. Recursive type constraint systems; Bibliography.